Excerpted from "BELICHICK: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time," by ESPN.com senior writer Ian O'Connor. Copyright @ 2018 by Ian O'Connor. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
Bill Belichick planted his hands around the football, lowered his head below his knees and peered through his helmet and the gap between his arched legs. He was a college sophomore at Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, and he was about to snap the ball on a practice play that would extinguish his love affair with the game.